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Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

As both a contributor to this blog, and an assertive, activist patient managing chronic conditions, I get to see both sides of professional health information management. And I have to say that while health data management pros obviously do great things against great odds, support for their work doesn’t seem to have trickled down to the front lines. I’m speaking most specifically about Medical Records (oops, I mean Health Information Management) departments in hospitals.

As I noted in a related blog post, I recently had a small run-in with the HIM department of a local hospital which seems emblematic of this problem. The snag occurred when I reached out to DC-based Sibley Memorial Hospital and tried to get a new log-in code for their implementation of Epic PHR MyChart. The clerk answering the phone for that department told me, quite inaccurately, that if I didn’t use the activation code provided on my discharge summary papers within two days, my chance to log in to the Johns Hopkins MyChart site was forever lost. (Sibley is part of the Johns Hopkins system.)

Being the pushy type that I am, I complained to management, who put me in touch with the MyChart tech support office. The very smart and help tech support staffer who reached out to me expressed surprise at what I’d been told as a) the code wasn’t yet expired and b) given that I supplied the right security information she’d have been able to supply me with a new one. The thing is, I never would have gotten to her if I hadn’t known not to take the HIM clerk’s word at face value.

Note: After writing the linked article, I was able to speak to the HIM department leader at Sibley, and she told me that she planned to address the issue of supporting MyChart questions with her entire staff. She seemed to agree completely that they had a vital role in the success of the PHR and patient empowerment generally, and I commend her for that.

Now, I realize that HIM departments are facing what may be the biggest changes in their history, and that Madame Clerk may have been an anomaly or even a temp. But assuming she was a regular hire, how much training would it have taken for the department managers to require her to simply give out the MyChart tech support number? Ten minutes? Five? A priority e-mail demanding that PHR/digital medical record calls be routed this way would probably have done the trick.

My take on all of this is that HIM departments seem to have a lot of growing up to do. Responsible largely for pushing paper — very important paper but paper nonetheless — they’re now in the thick of the health data revolution without having a central role in it. They aren’t attached to the IT department, really, nor are they directly supporting physicians — they’re sort of a legacy department that hasn’t got as clearly defined a role as it did.

I’m not suggesting that HIM departments be wiped off the map, but it seems to me that some aggressive measures are in order to loop them in to today’s world.

Obviously, training on patient health data access is an issue. If HIM staffers know more about patient portals generally — and ideally, have hands-on experience with them, they’ll be in a better position to support such initiatives without needing to parrot facts blindly. In other words, they’ll do better if they have context.

HIM departments should also be well informed as to EMR and other health data system developments. Sure, the senior people in the department may already be looped in, but they should share that knowledge at brown bag lunches and staff update sessions freely and often. As I see it, this provides the team with much-needed sense of participation in the broader HIT enterprise.

Also, HIM staff members should encourage patients who call to log in and leverage patient portals. Patients who call the hospital with only a vague sense that they can access their health data online will get routed to that department by the switchboard. HIM needs to be well prepared to support them.

These concerns should only become more important as Meaningful Use Stage 3 comes on deck. MU Stage 3 should provide the acid test as to whether whether hospital HIM departments are really ready to embrace change.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

In this video we look at the state of HIM today with Charlie Saponaro, President and CEO of Medical Record Associates. We talk about where HIM is heading and trends like remote HIM and outsourced HIM. This is a wide ranging conversation about HIM and many of the important trends that are happening.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I got into a recent discussion about the role of HIM professionals in an EHR implementation. I thought this was also a timely post since I got a request today to again attend the AHIMA annual conference. I had such a good time at the AHIMA conference last year, that it looks like I’m going to attend AHIMA 2012 in Chicago, but I digress.

In response to the discussion about the HIM professionals role in EHR implementations, I offered the following comment:

I think they’re an essential part of the implementation. The place I see them most used is in how to deal with the old paper charts. The challenge is usually turning them on the idea that they’re useful and valuable even in an EHR world. Many just assume (incorrectly) that their job is gone. It’s not, but it does change.

Just a few places where they will still have to be involved post EHR implementation can include:
-ROI (Release of Information) from the EHR and the old paper charts
-Scanning Loose Paper into EHR (or overseeing that process)
-Quality Checking (similar to paper chart audits)

I’m sure there are more, but those are a few off the top of my head.

Personally, I loved talking with our HIM staff during our EHR implementation. In many ways they were a great “sanity” check for me. They weren’t afraid to point out things that I may not have considered. I did feel bad, because I could tell that the HIM director always felt like HIM wasn’t really listened to during the EHR implementation. I can’t speak for some of the other clinical leadership, but I was always grateful for the role that HIM played in the EHR implementation.

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